In my wanderings through food blogs, I keep coming across the serving suggestion of ‛smashed potatoes’ and for a long time, I assumed that this was a new and trendy way of saying ‛mashed potatoes’. However, I saw a recipe for them, linked under something else I was looking for and All Was Revealed.
I suspect that the better celebrity cooks are trying to improve people’s dietary habits; they also realise that many of their fans are as lazy as the rest of us (and probably much more so than their grandparents) when it comes to cooking, so they make a lot of use of an oven, on the principle that it does the work without being supervised. I thoroughly endorse their first goal – smashed potatoes retain their skins; I am much less enthusiastic about the latter – ovens require a lot of energy and we should all be using as little as possible. (I should be so much happier if celebrity cooks and food bloggers enthusiastically endorsed counter-top ovens, which are, of course, a complete irrelevancy to Voyaging Vegetarians. Apparently, according to Vegan Punks, smashed potatoes can also be finished in an Air Fryer, which is even more of an irrelevancy!)
Anyway, below is my way of producing smashed – or far more accurately, squashed – potatoes without an oven.
Put the trivet in the pressure cooker, add (sea)water just up to the level of the trivet, put in the potatoes and cook at full pressure for 5 minutes
Reduce the pressure at room temperature
Put a large frying pan over a low heat and add some olive oil – just enough that you can swirl it round the pan.
Take a potato, put it on a chopping board and just split the skin with a sharp knife, in a cross – if the skin is a bit tough, it may not split on the top of the potato unless you do this.
Now take a broad spatula, or – if you don’t mind making washing up – the base of a cup and gently squash the potato so that it splits into several lumps, still joined by the skin at the bottom. Carefully lift it into the frying pan, followed by the others, dealt with in the same way.
Sprinkle them all with garlic, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper and cover. Cook for about 15 minutes until the base of the potatoes is crisp. If you cook the potatoes first, they can be crisping up while you make the rest of the meal. They will stay hot long enough for you to cook a separate vegetable, too, if you only have two burners.
These potatoes are, in fact, a great substitute for mashed potatoes: not everyone likes peel in their mash, but most people love crispy potato skins!
Variations:
You can use whatever herbs or spices take your fancy, of course and fresh ones would be lovely.
I suppose you could always serve these smashed potatoes ‛loaded’ as USAnian food bloggers would say, which I gather means covered in whatever takes your fancy. I’m not a fan of heaps of different ingredients piled haphazardly on top of something else, but I can see the toppings that you might put on baked potatoes, to turn them into a full meal, would work well on smashed potatoes.
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